Visual Art Medium

Oil paint is a type of slow-drying paint consisting of small pigment particles suspended in a drying oil. Oil paints have been used in England as early as the 13th century for simple decoration, but were not widely adopted for artistic purposes until the 15th century. The most common modern application of oil paint is domestic, where its hard-wearing properties and luminous colors make it desirable for both interior and exterior use. Its slow-drying properties have recently been used in paint...

Watercolor (US) or Watercolour (UK) (and "aquarelle" in French) is a painting method. A watercolor is the medium or the resulting artwork, in which the paint are made of pigments suspended in a water soluble vehicle. The traditional and most common support for watercolor paintings is paper; other supports include papyrus, bark papers, plastic, vellum or leather, fabric, wood, and canvas. In East Asia, watercolor painting with inks is referred to as brush painting or scroll painting. In Chinese...

The gelatin-silver process is the photographic process used with currently available black-and-white films and printing papers. A suspension of silver salts in gelatin is coated onto acetate film or fiber-based or resin coated paper and allowed to dry (hence the term dry plate). These materials remain stable for months and years unlike the 'wet plate' materials that preceded them. The Gelatin-Silver process was introduced by R. L. Maddox in 1871 with subsequent considerable improvements in...

Encaustic painting, also known as hot wax painting, involves using heated beeswax to which colored pigment are added. The liquid/paste is then applied to a surface usually prepared wood, though canvas and other materials are often used. The simplest encaustic mixture can be made from adding pigments to beeswax, but there are several other recipes that can be used some containing other types of wax, damar resin, linseed oil, or other ingredients. Pure, powdered pigments can be purchased and...

The word ceramic is derived from the Greek word κεραμικός (keramikos). The term covers inorganic nonmetallic materials which are formed by the action of heat. Up until the 1950s or so, the most important of these were the traditional clay, made into pottery, brick, tile and the like, along with cement and glass. Clay-based ceramics are described in the article on pottery. A composite material of ceramic and metal is known as cermet. The word ceramic can be an adjective, and can also be used as...

A newspaper is a written publication containing news, information and advertising, usually printed on low-cost paper called newsprint. General-interest newspapers often feature articles on political events, crime, business, art/entertainment, society and sports. Most traditional papers also feature an editorial page containing columns which express the personal opinions of writers. Supplementary sections may contain advertising, comics, coupons, and other printed media. Newspapers are most...

A crayon is a stick of colored wax, charcoal, chalk, or other materials used for writing and drawing. A crayon made of oiled chalk is called an oil pastel; when made of pigment with a dry binder, it is simply a pastel. A grease pencil or china marker (UK chinagraph pencil) is made of colored hardened grease and is useful for marking on hard, glossy surfaces such as porcelain or glass. Wax crayons are commonly used for drawing and coloring by children. Crayons are a staple at most schools...

A photograph (often shortened to photo) is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of what the human eye would see. The process of creating photographs is called photography. The word "photograph" coined 1839 by Sir John Herschel and is based on the Greek φώς ...

For the rock song by Nirvana, see Beeswax (song). Beeswax is a natural wax produced in the bee hive of honey bee of the genus Apis. Beeswax is produced by young worker bee between 12 and 17 days old in the form of thin scales secreted by gland on the ventral surface of the abdomen. Worker bees have eight wax-producing mirror glands on the inner sides of the sternites (the ventral shield or plate of each segment of the body) on abdominal segments 4 to 7. The size of these wax glands depends on...

Willows, sallows and osiers form the genus Salix, around 400 species of deciduous tree and shrub, found primarily on moist soil in cold and temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Most species are known as willow, but some narrow-leaved shrub species are called osier, and some broader-leaved species are called sallow (the latter name is derived from the Latin word salix, willow). Some willows (particularly arctic and alpine species), are low-growing or creeping shrubs; for example the...

Screenprinting, silkscreening, or serigraphy is a printmaking technique that creates a sharp-edged image using a stencil. A screenprint or serigraph is an image created using this technique. It began as an industrial technology, and was adopted by American graphic art well before the 1900s. It is currently popular both in fine arts and in commercial printing, where it is commonly used to print images on T-shirt, hat, CD, DVD, ceramics, glass, polyethylene, polypropylene, paper, metals, and...

In chemistry, a metal (Greek: Metallon) is defined as an element that readily loses electrons to form positive ion (cations) and forms metallic bond between other metal atoms. (forming ionic bonds with non-metals). In common usage, the term "metal" is also used to describe something that is considered to be strong, tough, or heavy-duty, without necessarily indicating that the object in question is actually made of metal elements (as in heavy metal music). The metals of the periodic table are...